8 Pierce County police agencies get grant money to store more sexual assault kits
To improve the chances of solving sexual assault cases, eight police departments in Pierce County are getting grant money to buy refrigeration units used to store sexual assault kits and other evidence.
Funding will come from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office as part of a campaign to end the state’s rape kit backlog. More than $177,204 will be given to 53 law enforcement agencies statewide.
Among them are police departments in Bonney Lake, Fife, Gig Harbor, Lakewood, Milton, Orting, Pacific and Puyallup.
“More storage means more evidence can be tested, and more crimes can be solved,” Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement. “These resources will bring justice to survivors.”
He said storage was the thing law enforcement told the Attorney General’s Office they most needed to comply with a law passed in 2020 that requires sexual assault kits and other evidence to be stored for at least 20 years, even if the crime has not been reported to police.
Sexual assault kits are collected at hospitals, but the evidence will be stored by law enforcement in case the victim reports the crime.
Evidence from reported assaults are required to be stored for 100 years.
The AG’s Office is giving money to 41 agencies with this first round of funding. The other dozen agencies will receive grant monies in a second round.
Ferguson did not specify which agencies would receive money first.
State officials have been working since 2015 to shrink a massive backlog in testing rape kits and develop policies to better handle sexual assault cases, like offering trauma-informed training to police officers.
The Washington State Patrol Crime Lab has tested 5,278 kits since then, resulting in 1,315 DNA matches in a national DNA database, according to the AG’s Office.
That’s more than half of the 9,232 backlogged kits the state started with in 2016.
This year, the focus remains on testing more kits but also developing a reference card patrol officers can use to connect survivors of sexual assault with resources and ensuring hospitals have reliable access to the kits, according to an annual report by the Washington Sexual Assault Forensic Examination Best Practices Advisory Group.
This story was originally published March 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
